Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday November 26, 2007 @11:06PM
from the since-my-fallout-with-you dept.

HeavensBlade23 sends in an article from the German site Spiegel Online about mounting evidence that nuclear radiation may not be as deadly as has been widely believed. The article cites studies by German, US, and Japanese researchers concluding, for example, that fewer than 800 deaths are attributable to the after-effects of radiation in over 86,500 survivors of the Hiroshima bombing. Other surprisingly low death rates are reported in studies of Chernobyl and of a secret Siberian town called Mayak, devoted to producing plutonium, that was abandoned after a nuclear accident in 1957.

In the beginning, radiation was fantastic stuff that only had the effect of whitening your teeth. From 1970..2005, the "safe levels" have only fallen. Now some new guy says otherwise. Gee. I wonder how long his evidence will last?

"Not as dangerous as previously thought" is a far cry from "safe". This is sort of like estimating the number killed in the holocaust or sentencing guidelines for pedophiles, who wants to be on the low side?

It isn't the the safe levels have fallen it is that medicine has made the determination that no level of radioactive exposure can be considered safe. Exposure limits are then made so that it is extremely unlikely that someone will have their health compromised by radioactivity.

A very important point to note is that the determination that no level of radioactive exposure is safe does not mean the same thing as low levels of radiation are extremely dangerous (which many might believe). What the doctors are literally saying is that they don't consider a 10^-20 or even a 10^-40 Curie source to be perfectly safe. One errant gamma ray from the decay of some radioactive substance might be enough to cause a fatal cancer. As there is no safe level of exposure to asbestos, PCBs, or arsenic, reasonable limits are proposed where very few people are injured by these substances. The same applies to radiation levels. If the danger due to low level radioactivity is determined to be a thousand times less dangerous than we thought it was then the exposure limits might be raised if convenient, but radioactive material will still not be considered safe, even in the smallest amounts.

You see this is the problem with the anti-nuclear moment. They have become so obsessed with ending everything that contains a nucleus that they see it as acceptable to dismiss any science to the contrary as "biased". The worst offenders are of course greenpeace, who will happily outright lie about it. Even using greenpeace's massively inflated numbers for the death toll from chernobyl, it would take several chernobyl style accidents per year for nuclear to even equal the death's from airpollition associated with fossil fuels. Yet the by far biggest demon in the eyes of this organisation, is the western nuclear industry.

I don't know if they simply don't know better, if they are too afraid to lose face should they change their policy, or if they just want to make themself look important, but in any case their claims are just out of touch with reality. It really does pain me to know that my country country (Sweden ) could have been on the road to virtually eliminate fossil fuels, but because of this nonsense we are still left with 50% of our energy coming from fossil sources, and the "green" party here wants to shut down the reactors that remain.

What every western country with half a bit of sense ought to do is to deploy large numbers of electric trains as alternative transportation ( maglev could even compete with airplanes in speed ), and produce the electricity with nuclear. If pressent developments in battery technology hold up, we could even have electric cars affordable within a few decades. IF we can keep the electricity price down. Sadly the latter is not going to happen by pushing for renewables that have multiple times the costs of current nuclear power plants.

Now to follow is the usual nonsense about uranium running out within 60 years, nuclear waste being impossible to deal with, and another chernobyl being just about to happen. It's all nonsense, and has been for two decades at least, yet we still burn coal rather than transmuting our nuclear waste in fast reactors ( Thank you for that one Kerry ).

> It's all nonsense, and has been for two decades at least, yet we still burn coal rather than transmuting our nuclear waste in fast reactors ( Thank you for that one Kerry ).

Not Kerry. Carter. Same party. Same environmental policy. Different dumbass.

Sad thing is that Kerry's stance could be excused. Carter, as a nukeE, should have known better.

In Carter's defense, he presumably did know better -- he merely (mis)judged the proliferation risk of all nuclear-power-producing companies getting into FBRs as "worse" than the risk of relying on foreign oil. Carter was dead wrong, but at least he thought about the issue, unlike Kerry, who just pandered to the lunatic fringe of the eco-left.

Not Kerry. Carter. Same party. Same environmental policy. Different dumbass.

I agree, sorta. I'm a Republican and I can't stand Carter. He was certainly wrong about many things, and his killing of breeder reactors and fuel rod re-use was among them, however, he was also pretty darned right about promoting nuclear power.

When TMI happened, Carter went there, to illustrate that it was perfectly safe. At that moment, Republicans actually jumped the pro-nuclear boat and hopped onto the anti-nuclear bandwagon, and used the moment to show that Carter was being irresponsible, doesn't have a clue, even though Jimmy, as one of Rickover's boys, probably knew more about nuclear power than just about anyone. As a result of this moment of bipartisan acord between the loonie left and right, nuclear power was killed in America, and Reagan actually never advanced it.

You ought to pay more attention to the nonsense. A nuclear acceident is only like 20 mistakes away at any particular moment. And, at least in the US, every single spent nuclear rod containment facility at every single operating plant is at capacity. So, nonsense or not, we haven't figured out what to do with the stuff. Its been like 60 years, and we just don't know where it can be safely stored for 30,000 years. Considering that nuclear power has only gotten cheap due to the massive resources poured into its development since the 1940s (for bomb fuel, remember power from fission is a side effect), if the same resources were poured into solar development, then solar would be cheap.

Yes, but if you do recycle it propperly and use fast reactor to incinerate the actinides, then you end up with 100 times less waste per amount of energy produced, and it decays to safe levels within a few hudnred years instead of hundreds of thousands of years. Using it simply for this reason would still give us hundreds of years of energy just burning existing waste.

Isotopes that takes "hundreds of thousands of years" to decay are not dangerously radioactive in the first place. After a few hundred years of storage most nuclear waste is a small health risk and can handled like any other toxic waste. The reason waste dump are being specified for thousand-year lifetimes is politics, not science.

"... and we just don't know where it can be safely stored for 30,000 years."

Oh please. Research the term "half-life", and then get back to me when you have half an education. Anything that's going to be seriously radioactive for 30,000 years is going to be an alpha emitter. Whose highly dangerous particles need massive shielding between you and the source, like that provided by, say, a piece of paper. Rule of thumb: highly energetic equals extremely short half life.

There are two problems in the quoted fragment: The use of "we" and the use of "safely". We, because with people like you in the picture it's obvious that WE don't have a clue. Safely, because everyone who's against it defines "safe" as zero risk, when NOTHING in this world is zero risk. You're at risk from a meteorite bashing your brains out while you sleep. Are the odds against it? Yes. Is the risk zero? No.

Last time I checked, I believe it's said that in 10,000 years all of the material of which speak so alarmingly would still be radioactive. Well, at least as radioactive as the raw ore from which it came. You know, like rocks? Which we've had buried in the ground unshielded, leaking dangerous trace amounts of radioactively into our groundwater supplies for a few billion years or so. I tell you, someone should DO something!

Not to belittle this, but we've had two major, ultimately worst-case radiological events occur: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet, both of those sites are habitable today. Millions of people live there, work there, play there. Let's repeat that. Two atomic BOMBS.

And you want to bitch about the "dangers" of a material fused into glass, tucked behind shields, and buried in a fucking mountain?

Dude, you ought to pay LESS attention to the nonsense. You've been brainwashed by too many b-grade science-fiction movies with giant radioactively mutated spiders/scorpions/bats.

Actually those alpha emitters are very poisonous. Artificial radionucleides like Neptunium, Plutonium etc can easily get into the food chain and stay there as heavy metals. The fact that they are radioactive is not a nice bonus. It's very important we know how to store them safely for extremely long periods with no access to underground water.

Natural Uranium is by nature very diluted. Plutonium essentially does not occur naturally. We are talking here about very concentrated sources produced by the nuclear industry. If you have a workable solution let's hear it.

Worst-case biological events are not necessarily bombs. The two examples you quote were very small bombs by today's standard BTW. However a blown up plant like Chernobyl releases far more nasty stuff than bombs : tons rather than kilos. I don't think the area around Chernobyl will be habitable in 50 years time.

Spent fuel is stored encased in glass and concrete. The risk of leaks is very small, and because the low volumes of waste can be concentrated in a few locations, only small areas would be contaminated even if there was a leak.

The Chernobyl plant was a very poor design and nobody is pursuing similar designs any more. The RBMK design encased the fuel in flammable graphite as moderator. When the reactor overheated and the hot graphite was exposed to the air a raging fire immediatly began, tearing the reactor core apart and sending particles of spent fuel into the air in great clouds of smoke. Water moderated designs obviously don't have this problem. (The experimental pebble-bed reactors are graphite moderated, but they are much less likely to overheat.)

The bombs used in Japan were also very dirty. Modern designs consume a much larger part of their fuel. The chief danger is that setting off a nuke on the ground will mix the nuclear material with dirt, causing concentrated fallout within a few miles of ground zero, instead of dispersing it relatively harmlessly in the atmosphere like an explosion in mid-air.

But that's only one problem. One annoying thing with nuclear reactors is that it also creates lots of radioactive material (i.e. parts of the reactor become radioactive when receiving neutrons). That increases the amount of nuclear waste quite a bit. (note that I'm not anti-nuclear, but I'd like to see a real solution for waste)

Jesus fucking Christ.

Neutron-activated radioactivity is *short-lived*, and the things like the reactor vessel that are rendered radioactive as a result of neutron activation are cons

Anything that's going to be seriously radioactive for 30,000 years is going to be an alpha emitter. Whose highly dangerous particles need massive shielding between you and the source, like that provided by, say, a piece of paper.

Yeah, but haven't you heard - paper is obsolete. It's all been replaced by computer displays (and "electronic paper"). If the alpha particles start whamming into those, before long you have lots of dead pixels. And we can't have that, now can we?

You see this is the problem with the anti-nuclear moment. They have become so obsessed with ending everything that contains a nucleus that they see it as acceptable to dismiss any science to the contrary as "biased"

Look, it's really not that complicated: radiation increases the risk of cancer and birth defects, at any dose. The mechanisms are understood, and there have been tens of thousands of experiments confirming that. Trying to argue that this isn't the case is simply insane. And it doesn't matter what kind of radiation it is.

Now to follow is the usual nonsense about uranium running out within 60 years, nuclear waste being impossible to deal with, and another chernobyl being just about to happen. It's all nonsense, and has been for two decades at least, yet we still burn coal rather than transmuting our nuclear waste in fast reactors ( Thank you for that one Kerry ).

It was Reagan that killed breeder reactors in the US (and effectively elsewhere). He claimed it was for proliferation concerns, but that makes no sense; more likely, he did it for economic reasons: nuclear fuel is big business for the US.

With breeder reactors, nuclear energy could possibly be an option. Without them, nuclear power is sheer lunacy.

So, complain to Reagan and the Republicans for the lack of responsible nuclear power in the US.

It was Reagan that killed breeder reactors in the US (and effectively elsewhere). He claimed it was for proliferation concerns, but that makes no sense; more likely, he did it for economic reasons: nuclear fuel is big business for the US.

With the election of President Bill Clinton in 1992, and the appointment of Hazel O'Leary as the Secretary of Energy, there was pressure from the top to cancel the IFR. Sen. John Kerry (D, MA) and O'Leary led the opposition to the reactor, arguing that it would be a threat to non-proliferation efforts, and that it was a continuation of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project that had been canceled by Congress. Despite support for the reactor by then-Rep. Richard Durbin (D, IL) and U.S. Senators Carol Mosley Braun (D, IL) and Paul Simon (D, IL), funding for the reactor was slashed, and it was ultimately canceled in 1994.

Also, I never claimed Chernobyl wasn't bad (nor did the article ), I'm claiming organisations like greenpeace are deliberately lying about it dismissing all science saying they are wrong, with the explicit intent to try to convince the public that Nuclear power is too dangerous to be used responsibly. Solar panels contain small amounts of polluting chemicals, but if I were to push pictures of solar cells next to children with birth defects, arguing that the people who promote their use are corrupt evil capitalists who don't care about hurting babies, then I'd rightly be criticised for lying in order to intentionally mislead the public. I'm saying anti-nuclear campaigners should be held to the same standards.

1) You are absolutely right about bad figures. On average, coal-fired plants produce much more exposure to radiation than nuclear plants and this is generally ignored by the anti-nuclear folks (of which I still count myself one). However, I will say that if it were a choice between coal (lots of green house gases, radioactive pollution, etc) vs nuclear (waste disposal issues, etc) I would choose the latter. In short, nuclear may be bad, but coal is definitely worse.

2) We need to understand that energy use has environmental cost. Simply throwing more power generators at a problem doesn't fix it. We need to do what we can to minimize that cost and this means a multi-level strategy. There is no magic bullet. A few nuclear power plants may be necessary but if we are smart we will pursue a number of other means first.

3) Cost per kWhr is not the only measure of energy's real cost. I think one must factor in the total environmental cost as well. This includes carbon consumption, hazardous waste disposal, environmental cost of production and disposal of generating equipment etc. We need to start at the bottom and work our way up. This means:
a) Conservation-oriented policies. Let us help try to get people to push for more energy efficiency in general so we don't need as many generators as we might otherwise.
b) methane from manure composting from dairy farms which may have close to a net zero cost. (On one hand capturing/burning the methane is *good* for the environment. On the other, the equipment still has to be manufactured and disposed of.)
c) Encouraging thermal solar energy use from areas where one would normally waste the energy is another proven area where we could come out ahead in terms of general conservation.
d) Wind power, properly done, is something I would call low-cost.
e) Any other ideas on agricultural waste, esp. the stuff that normally just gets burned?
f) fish-friendly hydroelectric dams
g) Current generation of nuclear reactors should replace coal generators.
h) More research needs to be done on renewable energy sources, and on storage and transmission systems (I think that ultracapacitors should also be seen as a green alternative to batteries in wind generators, for example).
h) More research needs to be done on fuel cycle issues and how to effectively eliminate waste (for example, by using the waste as fuel in other nuclear reactors)

I don't think it is an either/or question. I am not convinced that it is practical to use renewable energy at the current generation for current or future electrical needs, but I would think that everyone should be in favor of minimizing the role of non-renewable energy (in general) and the environmental cost of energy as a whole. Nuclear almost certainly has a part to play, but let's not make it any larger a part than it needs to be.

You see this is the problem with the anti-nuclear moment. They have become so obsessed with ending everything that contains a nucleus that they see it as acceptable to dismiss any science to the contrary as "biased".

I used to do research on the biological effects of ionizing radiation and we knew decades ago that most of the commonly held views of radiation exposure stem from 1950's vintage sci-fi movies. Not helped by later movies like China Syndrome, which had all the scientific accuracy of The Matrix. The anti-nuclear movement is one actor in a parade of misinformation.

One thing that challenges even knowledgeable people was that in population dosimetry studies the low dose groups would consistently out-live the controls. A little bit of radiation exposure was frequently better than none at all.

I always thought it was funny the public idly tolerates 500 people dying on the nation's highways on the average weekend but would chain themselves to a fence to protest a nuclear power plant in their state. I'd live next door to a nuke plant, provided it wasn't down wind from one of the old Russian carbon-core reactors. Your lifetime exposure would present a lower risk than a single trip to grandma's over the holidays.

yes, but history seems to indicate that any "solution" that requires people to change their behavior for no immediate personal benefit will fail dismally.

and as far as i see it, nuclear is our best option while we perfect wind/solar/geothermal/fusion/whatever. nuclear is not a permanent solution, but nothing is. even solar will only work for a few billion years and fission will work for a century or so, and even longer if we look to thorium and use integral fast reactors to burn the existing waste we have building up.

However, don't you think renewables are better than both fossil fuels AND nuclear power?

Yes of course, but the number of windmills, etc. needed to meet our energy needs is ridiculous. Plus, everybody seems to be in favor of wind power bu nobody seems to want it in their own back yards. "They're ugly, put them somewhere else" they tell us.

The problems with clean power generation aren't technical, they're political. Keeping the status que, bad as it is, is the easy route, so that's what's happening.

Renewable fuels suffer from several severe problems the green's don't want to see. The first is that farming is mining. Yes a farmer mines his soil. The process is exceptionally environmentally damaging. A typical farm loses about 5,000 or more pounds of material to erosion every year per acre. (Hectare conversion is approximately 5600 kg/hectare) The farmed items remove another 100 or so pounds per acre every year. The best soil recovery rates are below the 100 pounds per acre line.

Clearly your statement depends very heavily on what 'quality of life' means. Your statement *sounds* logical until one realizes that it is based on such a subjective concept - quality of life.I sincerely believe that quality of life can be *better* with less consumption, and at the same time better for the planet, and for this reason, I reject your claim that the cost of meaningful conservation would impact quality of life. It would change lifestyles for sure, but I don't think they would be 'worse' lifes

The fact that the vast majority of American cities are simply not built for pedestrians. I live in midtown Atlanta, and between the terrible and unreliable public transportation and the layout of the city itself, a car is almost a necessity unless you want to waste enormous amounts of time getting from place to place.

Most of these issues are intrinsic to the design of the American landscape. Spending the better part of a century with cheap and convenient individual transport

While your point is valid enough, it looks like the focus of these efforts is the effects of radiation on grown humans, who have a lot more cells. When the entire organism is derived from just 150 cells, a single messed-up cell could spawn millions down the line.

The photoessay that that picture comes from is interesting, but really it says nothing in particular about the effects radiation.Most of those kids (other than the one in the picture linked by the parent poster) looked like they could be suffering from nothing more unusual than cerebral palsy or other reasonably common physical and/or mental defects. If I went into any disabled children's care facility or cancer ward in any large city in the world with a camera and knocked the kids out of their fancy wester

There is something you need to understand about how the Japanese use statistics.

As an example, in Japan, to be tallied as a highway fatality, you must expire within 12 hours of the car accident that resulted in your death. If you die outside the 12 hour window, you fall into another category. 'heart failure - liver failure - kidney and lung failure'.

Japan is always happy to show off their annual "oh so low" highway death rates (so many per 1000 of the driving public, etc.), claiming their drivers are better trained and behaved than those from other countries. The Japanese govt. also insists that their cars/trucks and roadways are more modern, more advanced and more safe than those from other countries with higher death rates. "Look at us - WE'RE BETTER!"

I'm not at all surprised to hear that 'only' 800 died from radiation poisoning...that just means it was bad enough that it killed them before they had a chance to die from having all their skin burned off or their lungs turned to burnt toast. Or any of the other dozens of medical nightmares that are still being swept under the rug of history, even today.

Right - as if they were actually put to the test. With routine 40km traffic jams, they don't have much opportunity to take advantage of said improvements. But hey, with all those jumbo-trons lining the expressways, at least they have something to do while they sit and idle the commute away. The govt. makes it an expensive and difficult a process as possible in order to discourage car ownership. Motorcycle? You can't imagine the process to get a license and then purchase a new 'busa.

Buying a car is quite the experience. With no room for giant car lots and showrooms, the routine method is for a sales team to come to your home or office, where they painstakingly go over every option. Once you've made your choices, and honko'd all the e-forms, the wait begins. You wait while your car is built. And before you can have your purchase approved, you must show proof of having obtained an appropriate parking space. Many times, new car owners have to wait for a parking slot to become available long before they can even think about what color interior would go best with the wife's wardrobe.

Once you have the parking spot and car buying process behind you, a new list of routine obligations must be met. Like full car inspections at intervals designated by the manufacturer and (ahem) backed by the govt. You don't take the car in and ask for this or that to be looked at or fixed...nooo. They come and get the car, and then contact you with the list of things that must be done, along with how much it will all cost. No choice - pay up. Think of the whales. At one time, there was an anti-pollution law that said a new engine had to be installed every two years. Ever wonder why all those low mileage Toyota truck engines are for sale here in North America? Ever wonder how so many foreigners found it easy to get a car in Japan? Maintenance costs can be so high, some owners simply give the car away and go out and buy a new one.

There is/was a big black market for selling used cars from Japan into Russia. A 'used' car being one that is between two and three years old. You'll never see a beater running around the streets of Tokyo.

I recall the time the Russian circus came to Tokyo. The circus, animals and all, was hauled into Tokyo bay on a run down Russian freighter. When the show was over and it came time to load everything back onto the ship, Japanese dock workers were surprised to see the ship leaving without the animals. Dozens of used cars had been loaded onto the ship's deck during the night, some hanging 1/2 way over the side. The animals were abandoned, sitting in their cages on the dock, staring at the dock workers wondering if they tasted good or not. It took a while to straighten that one out.

Wow. This is gonna be modded offtopic, but it needs to be said. Some of your post is accurate, but some of it is misguided. Mainly, Tokyo is not Japan.

The right:

The stuff about license requirements is spot on. The racket surrounding license centers is annoying at best but mostly outrageous. Basically everyone pays a couple thousand bucks to a driving school to take courses for several months, after which you have as many chances to take the "test" at the driving school as you want, several times per day, and any day you want. Of course, the real test held at the government license center is harder, held only on weekday mornings if you're lucky, and the "rules" of the test bear no relation to actual driving. Don't get me started on the oogata bike test. That thing is even more of a swindle.

You are correct that the roads are not safer. In fact, almost none of the roads have reflective markers for rainy conditions. No "cat's eyes", no Botts' dots [wikipedia.org]. Drivers do not switch their headlights on in fog or rain or snow; I had three or four drivers actually flash their brights at me on Sado island for driving in a rainstorm with my headlights on last weekend! People here often stop in the middle of the road to answer a phone call, often on a blind curve. Ah, but at least they're not driving while talking on a phone... I guess their abysmally low speed limits are an attempt to make up for these deficiencies.

The road system is set up to be a big cash cow for the government. You are correct in that aspect.

The wrong:

The shaken inspections aren't mandated by the manufacturers, they're mandated by the government: after 3 years for a new car and every 2 years after that. Unlike US car inspections, they check more than just emissions: brakes, suspension, tires, transmission, all the lights, seat belts, and steering are among the things tested. The inspection itself winds up costing about 10000 yen plus any repairs, but you also pay taxes for two years at the same time, which is why it's so expensive. If you know a reputable repairman, the repairs will not cost that much. My guy gives me a loaner car while he's working on mine, no charge. Alternatively, you can do the fixes yourself and take the car in for inspection on your own time if you can get the time off work, which saves a bit of cash if you're handy. I do think this helps keep unroadworthy cars off the streets, and in that way helps safety... but it does cost an arm and a leg. You do have a choice: if it's too expensive to fix the car up to snuff, you scrap it. Part of owning a car means making sure it's not an accident waiting to happen.

Proof of parking space is only required in big cities: Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, basically any metro area. If you live outside those areas you don't need proof of parking. And there are plenty of car dealerships outside Tokyo where you can walk in, pick out and buy a car from the lot, and have it delivered to you or pick it up within a few days (after they fabricate the plates, no temporary tags here). If you haven't seen them, it's because you haven't been outside big cities.

Maximum expressway speed is 100kph outside cities on multiple lane highways. Where I live, congestion is rare because the expressways are only used for long trips. In clear dry weather most vehicles cruise between 100 and 120. If you live in Tokyo, don't get a car to drive to work every day, because you're right, the highways can't support that many people. But the only speed enforcement is fixed cameras and the rare patrol car (and there are unmarked cars as well, so be careful). Thankfully, almost everyone is courteous enough to pull over when they're not passing. I've seen a couple folks taking stretches in excess of 150kph on twisty road, and the rest of traffic just moves over to let them go. Assuming they have the space. But unfortunately the roads are not banked for the speeds their surfaces and widths support. And they are extremely overpriced.

I mean yeah... "only" 800 deaths is kind of callous. I'm not sure what the whole aim of that was. "Ten's of thousands died from the blast, but only a measly 800 died directly as an effect of radiation after surviving the attack."

A lot about this study doesn't really add up. If you're using death as the only symptom of something dangerous then your observations are definitely going to be flawed. All in all these studies don't make a whole lot of sense in there conclusions.

In 2001 I had radiation treatment for cancer. I didn't have any symptoms before starting the radiation treatment, but within days I was too sick to lift my head off the pillow, my hair fell out, I couldn't hold food down and I had severe formication, which is the feeling of bugs crawling on your skin. I remember a level of pain and discomfort that to this day makes me nauseous just to recall.Yes it cured my cancer, along with surgery and medication, and nearly 7 years later I am still cancer-free. Howev

Why? The article is not stating that they should add Plutonium to your Flintstone's Chewables. It's just saying that you should use, you know, actual science instead of imagined numbers based on something your cousin's-friends-dad(who is an X-ray tech, you know) heard from his boss.

Radiation sucks. The article says so. It just says that it doesn't suck as much as advertised. That shouldn't make you sick, it should make you happy.

As usual, the hyper-reactionary crowd here on Slashdot completely misses the point of the article and immediately pulls the same bullshit so often seen in discussions about other topics where a minority voice says something along the lines of "this isn't as bad as everyone seems to think", i.e. Global Warming.

Yes, 4,000 children developing cancer is absolutely terrible, even if "only" 9 of them die. Yes "only" 800 deaths due to radiation after the blast is a tragedy. The 4,000 deaths of cleanup workers at Chernobyl is completely unexcusable. However, the point of the article wasn't to claim "there have not been tragedies"... it was to claim "the tragedies are magnitudes less horrible than is popularly believed". 800 deaths are objectively fewer than the 105,000 reported in Wikipedia. 4,000 deaths are objectively fewer than "the six-figure death counts that opponents of nuclear power once cited".

Certainly, the fact that people died at all, and many more were disabled for life and suffer from other side-effects, is a tragedy. However, this article is simply stating that these tragedies are significantly less all-encompassing and absolute than is commonly thought. The conclusion, roughly, is that each of these is on the scale of a major earthquake, not a Holocaust. While it may be insensitive to subjectively compare the "level of badness" of different tragedies, it is simply a fact that there exist objective differences between them. That's what they are doing. I don't see people debating the accuracy of the numbers they use, I see people complaining that these are evil shills who are minimizing human suffering to increase corporate profits. Grow up and RTFA people.

Wow, that's really a ridiculously uninformed thing to say. That such a major surgery could be carried out on four THOUSAND people with only nine deaths, REGARDLESS of the type of malady, is miraculous to me. You're practically that likely to get killed in US hospitals going in for the sniffles! And what's the point of your little "sickness?" Do you have a point? That we shouldn't use nuclear materials because they caused the deaths of NINE people? Hate to break it to you, more people than that died of starvation as I type this message. So you're willing to spend 10x as much and kill 10x as many because of some irrational bogeyman fear? You gotta be kidding.

If you ever worked for an organization like the CDC, you would go insane. When comparing disasters, it really is useful to point out the fact that some are relatively better than others. Our interpersonal emotional reactions to suffering have no place in a study of population-level problems.

Makes sense, the testes has some of the fastest reproducing cells in the human body - and we use radiation to treat cancer, which kills vulnerable fissioning cells much quicker than cells not undergoing mitosis.

I know this as it happened to my uncle. Who knows what other diseases might show up that don't necessarily produce immediate death.

True, but we've had 60 years to study the issue, and mostly the results are that some radioactive materials(like iodine en

I happened to be in the military at the time Chernobyl accident happened. They sent us there without explaining anything. The result - I saw a lot of 20 years old people who had all kinds of medical problems (of cause, nothing to do with exposure to radiation).

Me? I am still alive, thanks. I cannot have children. I am also bold since I was around 25. Where do I sigh for manifestation that radiation is not hazardous?

So far 301 have died of lung cancer," says Jacob. "But only 100 cases were caused by radiation. The others were attributed to cigarettes."

So heavy doses of radiation still have a decently high probability of causing nasty side effects. The quote I provided illustrates what I have concluded from this summary. You can downgrade radiation from supermegaultra, don't-go-near it danger to megaultra, don't-go-near it status. Radiation is still dangerous. This study was just a refinement of probability.

I'm not suprised to see studies like this coming out. With renewed interest in fission power as a clean (emissions-free) energy source, a big hurdle will be changing the public perception and fear of radiation. But, if something gets changed people are going to have all kinds of conspiracy theories about industry leaning on the government to change regulations so they can make $$ at the expensive of people/environment. There are many honest dangers with radioactive sources, but most of those that get used

King Arthur: What does it say, Brother Maynard?Brother Maynard: It reads, "Here may be found the last words of Alexx K of Aramathia. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the holy grail in the Castle of Aaauuuggghhh..."King Arthur: What?Brother Maynard: "The Castle of Aaaauuuggghhhh"Sir Bedevere: What is that?Brother Maynard: He must have died while carving it.King Arthur: Oh come on!Brother Maynard: Well, that's what it says.King Arthur: Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't have bothered to carve 'Aaaauuuggghhhh'. He'd just say it.Sir Galahad: Maybe he was dictating it.King Arthur: Oh shut up!

Ok, thousands of people were exposed at Hiroshima, and we have a breakdown of what they died of. Boy, these people are healthy. Where's the weird cancers which people die of now and then? Where's the skin cancer? Prostate? I suspect an incredible scrubbing of data. Only cancers they decide are radiation-related are listed. And they're deciding.

There might be something to this, but I smell a grossly twisted study which eliminates complexity and debatable data by wiping it away with a sweep of a pen.

This reminds me of that news program where the journalist debunked 10 common myths like "underpaid teachers" and "Chernobyl was not so bad." I don't remember the name of the guy, but he runs a regular show on one of the major TV stations. I only wish I could send this report to many Chernobyl veterans and their kids who would say otherwise.

My uncle was in Chernobyl right after the crap hit the fan in 1986. He went in a young man with good health and came back on a partial disability due to radiation. No, radiation did not kill him but it rendered his eyesight useless. When my cousin was born it was found that he lacked a good immune system due to effects of radiation as well. With all this crap my family considers itself to be lucky. We did not have to watch our loved ones dying from the inside. The Soviets did a great cover-up preventing most Western media from accessing the people and the territory until things were hanky panky. What many people did not see was the kids born after the disaster and increasing cancer rates. You know things are pretty crappy when you have routine cancer checks in middle schools. How many American schools consider this to be yearly procedure? I remember a woman telling a story about her husband. She had to spent all of her savings on vodka and moonshine in order to calm her husbands pain and let him die without screaming. Oh yeah, save those jokes about drunk Russians: The guy did not drink until his muscles started to fall of the bone. Finally you may take a look at the effects of radiation on Kazakhstan. After years of being used as a Soviet nuclear testing ground, the country has plenty of polluted land. Perhaps the authors of this report want to buy some prime real estate in the land of Borat?

I don't doubt that we will find out more about radiation as we go on; however, it is silly to think that nukes (be it peaceful or military) are a joke. It is a serious business with serious side effects.

I hate to be blunt, but do you actually have any evidence to support your contention that what happened to your family was caused by radiation? Plenty of people not exposed to fallout from nuclear accidents get eyesight problems, and autoimmune problems. I should know - I've got one (thankfully a pretty mild case, but it still put me in hospital twice).

Scientific studies have generally failed to show is unusual rates of this kind of disease in areas affected by Chernobyl fallout. The one clear health ef

It couldn't have possibly been due to eating only one potato a week for years, working 20 hours a day on a collective farm, drinking wine made from radiator fluid and vodka made from brake fluid. So it must have been the radiation.

First, I'm sorry for your loss, but nobody's saying that radiation isn't dangerous - just that it's not as dangerous as people make it out to be.It'd be like saying 'You're 200% likelier to die of lung cancer if you smoke', then researchers come out and say 'No, it's only 100%'. Keep in mind that it's still the worst nuclear power* disaster in history.

In the ensuing decades, up to 4,000 cleanup workers and residents of the more highly contaminated areas died of the long-term consequences of radiation expos

Your comments are no better than a Godwin argument. You are actually trying to say that if the researchers don't say that Chernobyl is infinitely bad, then they must be saying it was perfectly OK? And, working in the lending industry, my wife has seen W-2 from literally thousands of teachers. They make pretty good money for a part time job.

Yeah, part time. Let's see, 7:30 AM to 3:00 PM, then extra-curricular duties, lesson planning, grading papers, and taking the continuing education courses required of them at their own expense. Yeah, any job that takes only 70 hours a week out of 168 is definitely part-time. Then, of course, there's the three months of the year the kids are out. Only one and a half to two and a half months of which are, for teachers, typically taken up by meetings, room setup, conferences, and often teaching summer school.

My sister, cousin, and several of my friends are teachers. I know how much time they spend working outside the classroom, and you are full of it. One prep period is usually allowed a teacher. That's the length of one class, or about 50-55 minutes in a non-block schedule. They often have to eat their lunches with the kids one or two days a week and supervise them, and on the days they're not in that rotation they often get about as long as their students -- half an hour maybe -- for lunch. If an hour to an h

I don't know if I would trust the state of NJ more than I would trust the Soviet government that was present in 1986. To be honest with you, may be in 50 years we will know 1% of the true effects. Remember how cocaine was legal in the United States?

One of my most exciting moments of my childhood was the rain of April 26th, 1986. I was walking from the hospital when it started raining and I got soaked by the time I got home. Several days later we were told to throw away the clothing used on that day and take a long shower because a chemical plant not so far away had a problem. Cool huh? As somebody who was under 10, it was "it!" I was a part of something that the government asked me to do. It felt great until my mom got a call from my grandmother: My uncle was traveling to Belaja Tserokv' (White Church) with a his chem-bat (chemical forces battalion). My grandma was a nurse and she suspected that something was going on since they tons of firefighters were shipped to the area. It was highly unusual to send that many people for a small chemical spill at a nuclear plant. I will skip you the stories about carefully re-adjusted radiation meters given to the soldiers and other tricks that were used to keep public away from the information about the real aspects of the accident. Everything was "peaches and cream" according to the top brass. My uncle delivered cement to the reactor thinking that they were putting down some important fire. Only later we were told about the nuclear disaster and its impact. During the times of Perestroika this became more public and we finally realized what has hit, but it was too freaking late.

I would like to come back and visit the ghost areas. Many areas of Belarus and the Ukraine (Belarus was hit the hardest due to the North-Western winds) became ghost towns. It is a lot like what you can find in the prominent historic parks of the U.S.: Whole towns are there, but no people want to live there for the exception of an occasional squatter. You may see a Western tourist here and there and that is about it. Whoever thinks that radiation is not damaging needs to get their head examined. Yes, a direct death from the exposure may be unlikely, but I'd rather not wait for the long term effects. Honestly, I have seen that stuff and it is not pretty. I'd take a bullet over slow death any time.

The article was refreshingly in-depth and it covered both sides of the issue - surprising, considering most./ articles are not much more than short blog rants. I do wish it had pointed readers to an online location of the studies cited, but the reports are verifiable. I was aware of cooperative studies done after WWII by the US and Japan, among others.

My gut reaction is to accept the information presented as reliably true. I have two reasons for this. First, this was published to a German site. I trust a German site slightly more than your average dot-com because of the competing forces at play in the current US 9/11 mindset. The Bush "gubmint" wants you to cower in terror every damn day fearing random acts of violence by brown people (Appropriate thanks to George Carlin). The more peaceful side of the US continues to try to reassure the public that much of the terror threat is FUD (which it is - seriously, we've been at the Orange terror level for months, meaning "High Risk of Attack". No attacks, no highly publicized failed plots to garner support for the omnipresent Orange. I doubt the FBI/CIA/DHS is doing THAT well). I admit the US has its enemies, and that fact should not be discounted. It's true that someone may someday use a nuke (or more likely a dirty bomb) in an American metropolis. But if this was posted to an American website, I would have a harder time accepting it at face-value, rather than subtle "fear not" messages by pro-nuclear lobbyists. That said, as an American citizen in a metro area, I'm happy to see that moderate radiation may be tolerated by the body better than expected, and i am also in support of more nuclear power plants in the US. Nuclear power done right releases less radioactivity into the air per year than a coal plant...and probably less than the pack of cigarettes I'll finish tonight.

Second, the effects of short-term radiation exposure are typically exaggerated, in my non-professional opinion. A chest X-ray for example, is roughly equal to 10 days' worth of background radiation dosage; fewer if you live 5000 feet or more above sea level. Not bad considering your heart and lungs are the target of a quick 120,000 electron-volt blast (Linkage) [netdoctor.co.uk]. Cancer treatments can exceed 10 MeV. Granted, I'm talking about reasonable short-term exposure, something less than 3 or 4 Greys for a one-time worst-case scenario. I'm not going to argue that pulling a Spock and walking into a reactor for a while will leave you anywhere near healthy.

I think long-term radiation exposure is where we need to concern ourselves. For example, Marie Curie handled radioactive material with little to no protection for nearly 40 years, before dying of anemia in 1934. This can be partly attributed to the fact that much of the radiation she was exposed to was alpha radiation. However, long-term exposure to radium (which is over a million times more radioactive than uranium) and its byproducts, including radon gas and ionizing beta particles most likely led to her death. Gamma radiation is much more harmful, with the ability to knock base pairs out of DNA. Even the most loved radiation of all, UV, that elixir of youthful bronzed skin, has been shown to cause harm. But no one gets carcinoma from a single sunburn, or a single tan. The most deleterious effects add up over time, but are not caused by forgetting to slide the lead suit over the family jewels during an X-ray at the dentist.

Saying that only 800 or so out of 86,000 survivors died of radiation-related illness is not enough for me. How many showed non-fatal illness extending beyond 1 year of exposure to the bomb? What was the change in infant and child mortality 5/10/20 years after? How did the population histogram change over time - were elderly affected more than children or vice versa? How much radiation WAS deposited to the environment after the detonation of Fat Man/Little Boy -- accident at Chernobyl -- accident at Three

Germany does have the fact that currently the government is on track to phase out [wikipedia.org] all of it's nuclear reactors within the next few decades. There are those who'd love to reverse that direction (and a couple of people in the US nuclear industry that I've talked to have said this reverse of policy is almost inevitable). There's certainly a source for bias. How strong? I don't personally know.

As observed from atomic explosions (tests as well as deployment during war) HIGH radion doses are lethal.

But there's extensive research [magma.ca] being done today [marie-curie-prize.org] which seems to be indicating that low-dosage radiation is not only non-lethal but can actually be beneficial [lbl.gov].

I saw recently a (BBC?) documentary about ongoing research into the effects of radiation exposure. Basically we have *more than enough* evidence of the effects of short-term high-dosage (the upper/right side of the curve) but damn close to zero data regarding the lower/left side of the curve.

The does seem to be evidence that in some cases ongoing exposure to (relatively) low-level radiation (but still higher than "generally accepted" levels/"normal background" levels) is actually beneficial.

There was some village (Israel/Palestine/Middle-East 'ish') where the natural background radiation was something like two-hundred (200) times "normal" levels. The people there were perfectly normal, fine and healthy. In fact, researchers found the villagers were more healthy than normal/average for some diseases/conditions.

From Memory: I think the science is currently leaning towards the theory that even with radiation (which previously we thought that *any* was bad), "a little" can be good because it basically prompts the bodies natural response to damage/injury (eg in the same conceptual way that an innoculation helps prevent disease) .

Not that I'm pushing "radiation is good", but there's more than enough evidence to show that we clearly do not fully understand all the implications of exposure to radiation, especially when it comes to ongoing low dosage exposure over long time periods.

There was some village (Israel/Palestine/Middle-East 'ish') where the natural background radiation was something like two-hundred (200) times "normal" levels. The people there were perfectly normal, fine and healthy. In fact, researchers found the villagers were more healthy than normal/average for some diseases/conditions.

We have more or less only one good epidemiological set of data for various-dose radiation--atomic bomb survivors. Those data are extrapolated to low doses, and that's a large part of the data set from which the current "radiation damage" model (the LNT or "linear-no-threshold" model) is derived (actual survival of cells is predicted by a different model--the LNT model is for radiation effects on a person). Since the LNT model is the most widely-accepted standard in the field as far as I've seen (medical physics student), the hormesis promoters have the burden of proving the protective effect.

The parent is right in that we don't have a good understanding of what goes on at low doses of radiation, and we don't have a model backed by strong empirical observation either. Radiation protection, however, is founded on the principle of keeping doses as small as is reasonably possible, and it's irresponsible to try to wave around that small doses MIGHT not be as harmful as people currently think. I would say that radiation science still basically wants to say that there is no lower threshold for radiation damage, and thus that there is probably not a hormesic (hormestic? I don't know the adjectival form of hormesis) effect. It doesn't really need to be stated that we don't know a lot about low-dose radiation--you start from the assumption that you don't know a lot about it until you can prove that you do. Right now, all we can prove is that it's pretty likely that if damage is linear, then low-doses are bad too.

It is important to realize that the radiation deaths at Hiroshima were mostly caused by direct exposure to the radioactivity of the bomb blast itself, NOT from "fallout" as most people commonly believe. This is due to the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were airbursts of the weapons - they detonated 2000 feet or more above the surface. When this happens, the atomic blast destroys more buildings and causes more destruction over a larger area than had the bomb been dropped to ground level. This was intentional, as the goal of the bombing was to inflict as much damage as possible. But the side affect of this was that very little fallout was generated. Typically fallout is created when an atomic (or thermonuclear) weapon explodes in a ground burst. In a ground burst, the soil, rocks, building materials, etc. that are not vaporized are turned into ash that becomes radioactive due to the direct exposure. The ash is then swept up in the mushroom cloud and dispersed over a wide area. Chernobyl was far and away more dangerous with respect to fallout, because the radioactive core burned and spread really bad isotopes that would not happen to such a great degree with either a ground or airburst of a nuclear weapon. But then again, as has been pointed out, Chernobyl was an example of a bad idea gone worse - a flawed design, with no pressure dome, and human operation intentionally creating a dangerous situation not fully understood. Modern, Western nuclear reactors could never have the same kind of accident...

Wildlife is returning to Chernobyl and surviving due to the lack of mankind in the area. Obviously, diversity and levels are down below pre-kaboom, but the wildlife is managing. My unscientific and Business background is telling me that it's probably related to lower lifespans and less time for each individual animal to develop cancer. Long-term effects are yet unobservable, but will most-likely be pronounced.

But don't confuse the aftermath with the immediate consequences of the meltdown. How anyone can say that those effects are not as hazardous as we believed last week had better have some damn good and robust statistics.

To have a tentacle or two, particularly forward facing and prehensile would be an excellent optional add on to the current human model. Imagine the advantage of being able to grab a straw or napkin while using both "standard" grasping appendages to carry your tray of food and drink? Imagine being able to unlock and open your car door, your apartment door, or frankly your zipper while carrying baggage? Slashdot types in particular would be able to use a mouse or touch screen without repositioning the hand

Actual scientists have known this for years. Unless you get massive initial doses or a relatively large continuous dose, radiation has surprisingly little effect on you. Now, if you're a guy you might want to wait a couple months before having children if you had a radiation source close to your jelly beans, but otherwise the problems are few. However, until this point there haven't been any statistical studies proving it.

I am aware that Browns Ferry had a fire in the 1970's, but you've made me think of an interesting point. The water used in a reactor's triple cooling loop *should* remain separated twice over from the working fluid of the core. Heat is exchanged from the liquid sodium in the reactor, creating steam to drive the turbines. The steam is cooled in the evaporating towers, aided by a separate water supply which is often circulated into a lagoon/lake. The water temperature leaving the cooling towers is around 30C